What should religious education aim to achieve?: An investigation into the purpose of religious ...

189 Pages·2016·1.23 MB·English

What should religious education aim to achieve?
: An investigation into the purpose of religious
education in the public sphere.

Patricia Hannam
Student Number: 1623587

Thesis submitted for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

School of Education
University of Stirling

Date Submitted: January 2016

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Acknowledgements

There are a number of people whom I would like to thank for their help and
encouragement.
First would like to thank my supervisor Gert Biesta, Professor of Education at Brunel
University London for his insight, wisdom and generosity of time. Especially I want to
thank him for opening an educative space for my own beginnings in the world and for
relentlessly demanding precision in my writing and thinking; without which this thesis
would not have been possible. Thanks also to Dr John I’Anson of The University of
Stirling, whose practical support and advice have been vital in bringing this thesis to
submission.
I am also grateful to a number of colleagues and friends, especially Dr Darren Garside,
Dr Joanna Haynes and Dr Eugenio Echeverria. Without their encouragement and
interest in my work I may have lost heart; especially when life with a full time job and
family, alongside the focussed thinking needed for a PhD, got tough.
Special thanks also to many colleagues in the wider religious education world, but
especially in Hampshire, who have listened to the ideas emerging in this thesis and
given feedback as I have begun to test them out in practice.
Finally I would like to thank my family, especially my husband Steve and children
Ben, Sarah and Jono for their unfailing love, encouragement and patience, throughout
the exploration and writing of this work.

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Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the question of what religious education should aim to
achieve in the public sphere, and from that comes an interest in what is it that the
teacher of religious education should aim to do. My enquiry is located, theoretically as
well as conceptually, in the sphere of education. It is an educational study into religious
education and situated in what can be termed a ‘Continental construction’ of
educational research. I identify that since the inception of religious education in public
schools in England, persistent assumptions have been made about both religion and
education. I show how this has led, in my view, to conceptualisations of religious
education which have been, and continue to be, incomplete. The central chapters of my
thesis consider first religion and then education. This allows me to introduce my
theoretical base, which is especially but not exclusively drawn from the work of
Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt. I develop an argument suggesting that by also
understanding religion existentially as faith, rather than as only belief or practice, will
open new ways of considering the role of religious education in the public sphere. This
is alongside an argument I develop with Arendt for education being conceptualised as
bringing the child to action rather than to reason. This thesis argues for a broader
understanding of religion, and therefore what it means to live a religious life, in
religious education than has previously been considered. I bring this broader way of
understanding what it means to live a religious life together with my argument for
conceptualising education as bringing the child to action. This enables me to make a
new proposal for what religious education should aim to achieve in the public sphere.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 2
Abstract 3
Contents 4
Chapter 1 Introduction 8
1.1 Aims and research questions: what this thesis aims to achieve 8
1.2 Motivation for this thesis 9
1.3 Preview of the steps taken in this thesis and explanation 12
of the selection of informing scholarship
1.4 Where this thesis is located intellectually 16
1.5 What type of investigation is this? 17
1.6 Conclusion 19

Chapter 2 An overview of religious education in England. 20
2.1 Introduction 20
2.2 Religious education in maintained schools in England 20
1870 - 1966: origins and intentions
2.3 The confessional approach to religious education and 1960’s 24
challenges
2.4 The phenomenological approach to religious education in the 1970s 28
2.5 Critique of the phenomenological approach to religious education 31
2.6 Responding to critiques of confessional and phenomenological 36
approaches to religious education and the impact of the 1988
Education Reform Act
2.7 Identifying assumptions and observing their impact 41
2.8 Conclusion 43

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Chapter 3 Contemporary developments in the religious education curriculum 45
3.1 Introduction 45
3.2 The interpretive approach 46
3.2.1 Introduction 46
3.2.2 What is the interpretive approach to religious education? 46
3.2.3 Representation, interpretation, reflexivity and edification 49
3.2.4 Practical developments 51
3.2.5 Critical discussion 52
3.2.6 Conclusion 59

3.3 The critical realist approach 61
3.3.1 Introduction 61
3.3.2 What is the critical realist approach to religious education? 61
3.3.3 Practical developments 67
3.3.4 Critical discussion 68
3.3.5 Conclusion 74

3.4 The conceptual enquiry approach 76
3.4.1 Introduction 76
3.4.2 What is the conceptual enquiry approach to religious 76
education?
3.4.3 Practical developments 82
3.4.4 Critical discussion 84
3.4.5 Conclusion 89

3.5 Overall conclusion to chapter 3 91

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Chapter 4 What does it mean to be religious? 93
4.1 Introduction 93
4.2 Religion as belief 94
4.3 Religion as practice 99
4.4 Religion as existential 103
4.5 Conclusion 110

Chapter 5 What should education aim to achieve? 112
5.1 Introduction 112
5.2 Peters, education and freedom 113
5.2.1 Knowledge and reason 114
5.2.2 Education as bringing the child to reason 117
5.3 Arendt and freedom 121
5.3.1 Action, the public sphere and natality 122
5.4 What is required of education? 127
5.4.1 Education as bringing the child to human togetherness: 128
to action in plurality
5.4.2 What is the teacher required to do: attention, honesty and 130
discernment
5.5 Conclusion 135

Chapter 6 What should religious education do? 138
6.1 Introduction 138
6.2 Naming the problems in religious education 138
6.2.1 The interpretive approach 140
6.2.2 The critical realist approach 141
6.2.3 The conceptual enquiry approach 142
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6.3 Interrogating problems and discovering new possibilities 144
6.4 A different option for religious education 149
6.4.1 What should the teacher of religious education do? 152
6.5 When might it matter that religious education is 155
understood in this way?
6.5.1 The interpretive approach 156
6.5.2 The critical realist approach 159
6.5.3 The conceptual enquiry approach 162
6.6 Conclusion 166

Bibliography 169

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Chapter 1: Introduction.

‘Those are the pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange’

Shakespeare. The Tempest, 1: 2.

1.1 Aims and research questions: what this thesis intends to achieve
The intention of this thesis is to make an original contribution to the development of
new educational theory in religious education regarding its purpose, arguing a case for
a new conceptualisation of what religious education should aim to achieve. In this
chapter I introduce the scope of my investigation, place it within my professional
context and explain the motivation for my enquiry. I describe what kind of an enquiry
this is, and clarify my overarching research question and its origin, outlining three sub-
questions driving the research.
The key question at the heart of my thesis is little changed from the question Cox
(1983a) identified as ‘what is religious education essentially trying to do at this point in
history?’ (p.115). Re-examining this question is a key part of my thesis and will enable
me to bring something to the discussion, which I argue has not been sufficiently
considered before. That there are many weaknesses remaining in religious education is
clear from observations made in several national reports (see for example the All Party
Parliamentary Group on Religious Education 2013, Clarke & Woodhead 2015,
Dinham & Shaw 2015 and the Report of the Commission on Religion and Belief in
British Public Life 2015) and well discussed in religious education literature (see for
example Arweck & Jackson 2012; Conroy, Lundie, Davis, Baumfield, Barnes,
Gallagher, Lowden, Bourque & Wenell 2013 and Baumfield, Cush, & Miller, 2014).
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In my investigation I interrogate the concept of an educated person and develop an
argument for what religious education should aim to achieve. There is therefore some
resemblance between my approach and the one taken by Cox; however I take matters a
step further when I discuss, in light of this, what is it that the teacher is required to do in
order to achieve religious education’s purpose. This is in order to respond to a further
concern I show in the religious education literature regarding the persistent ‘uncertainty
among many teachers of RE about what they are trying to achieve in the subject’
(Ofsted 2010, p.6) and further ‘confusion about what they were trying to achieve in RE
and how to translate this into effective planning, teaching and assessment’ (Ofsted
2013, p.14). Cox’s (1983a) approach was to begin by seeing whether it would be
possible to ‘arrive at a concept of a religiously educated person’ (p. 11).
In order to discover what it is that religious education should aim to achieve, I identify
three research sub questions which I investigate through the central chapters of the
thesis. My first research sub-question is ‘what counts as religion in religious
education?’ In this chapter I take up the need for a discussion about religion for those
involved in religious education. However, rather than forming yet another definition of
religion I discuss three different ways in which religion can be conceptualised, and do
this through presenting three structurally different answers to the question ‘what does it
mean to be religious?’ My second research question is in relation to education and I
frame the question as ‘what is it that education should do or aim to achieve?’ I
approach this question first through an investigation into what it is that makes
education educative as contrasted to other kinds of things such as instruction, coercion
or indoctrination for example. My third research sub-question is in two closely linked
parts which enable me to bring together the findings of my investigation into questions
1 and 2. In my third question I ask first ‘how do these understandings of religion and
education help clarify what it is that religious education should aim to achieve?’ and
leading from that to investigate ‘what should the teacher of religious education do?’
that is in order for religious education to achieve what it aims to do.

1.2 Motivation for this thesis
This thesis has its beginning at least as far back as when I began to ask questions of
philosophy itself during my London undergraduate philosophy degree. A small group
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of us in the philosophy department at Bedford College (which subsequently relocated
to Kings) requested lectures in existentialism and what we thought of as ‘European
Philosophy’. This marked a small rebellion in the midst of the heavily analytic Anglo-
American climate of the traditional intercollegiate London philosophy BA degree of the
late 1970s. A doctoral student in the department introduced us to the writings of
Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Simone Weil. This news alerted me to the
possibility that the study of matters of human existence and subjectivity was a
legitimate area of intellectual activity; radically changing the course of my thinking
from thence forward.
Questions in relation to matters of human existence emerged again when I undertook a
PGCE in religious education in the early 1980’s; this was followed immediately by an
MA(ed), both courses undertaken at the London Institute of Education, in the religious
education department and at that time led by Edwin Cox. Cox (1983a) had just
published ‘Problems and Possibilities for Religious Education’ which was an
investigation into the purpose of religious education. Significantly my PGCE also came
just 6 years after the strongly phenomenological Birmingham Agreed Syllabus (1975)
was published and 3 years after the Hampshire Agreed Syllabus of 1978. I say
significantly, because both these syllabuses heralded a new way forward for religious
education following a period of confessionalism. David Naylor, architect of the
Hampshire Syllabus of 1978, was a guest at one of our weekly seminars and we were
invited to compare the two syllabuses. Robert Jackson’s work was establishing at
Warwick and was celebrated in our course as an interesting challenge to the
‘Phenomenological Approach’. My PGCE and MA gave me the opportunity to study
the history of religious education in some detail, and to undertake courses in the
philosophy of education. Paul Hirst and Richard Peters and others working at and
connected to the London Institute of Education at the time, ensured my early teacher
formation had a strongly philosophical perspective. The developing field of philosophy
of education in England at that time was nevertheless much influenced by the analytic
school. This analytic influence, because of its focus on reason and knowledge, was
beginning to come to the attention of, and requiring a response from, those working in
religious education.
I was aware of potential areas of conflict emerging between an analytic philosophy of
education and the existential dimensions of religion. My undergraduate course had
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